Congress: Gobble, Gobble

Members of Congress managed to quit for the year early Wednesday - in time to go home and eat turkey.

The Thanksgiving bird is a good symbol for much of the lawmakers' performance in this first half of the 101st Congress.

Take, as a measure of that performance, two related problems: federal debt and new federal spending.

The nation is lucky the lawmakers found - at the last minute - a way to meet the deficit limit for this new fiscal year, as set by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law.

How remarkable that they did it with a boost from George Bush. The president actually agreed to bend a bit on his no-new-taxes pledge.

No publicity on this, please - or so Mr. Bush wishes - but he'll go along with Wednesday's $14.7 billion plan to cut the budget. It includes about $5.7 billion in new taxes, mostly from corporations.

Congress could have avoided all these contortions if it had done its job on time, enacting an acceptable plan to cut the budget by the deadline back in October. It didn't, and Mr. Bush had to make mindless across-the-board cuts, as the law requires in such a case.

Indeed, the new plan won't cancel these across-the-board cuts until early February.

Why's that? Because this delay is where $4 billion of the $14 billion in savings will come from. The delay will bring considerable pain to agencies that spend most of their money on salaries and have little incidental fat to cut.

Unacceptably, Congress - and the administration - also went on trying to work around the deficit limits in other ways. The best example: the plan to start the horrendous $300 billion bailout of the savings and loan industry.

All of the cost should have been added to federal budgets over the next few years. That would have been an honest handling of this new burden for the taxpayers.

Instead, only $20 billion of the bailout's $50 billion first installment went into a budget - last year's. The other $30 billion will be handled so it won't count against deficit limits.

Well, this wasn't entirely what Harry Truman might have called a do-nothing congressional session.

The lawmakers accelerated the war against drugs and raised the minimum wage. They voted money to help Poland and Hungary in their struggle for democracy. And they struck a deal with the administration on continuing limited humanitarian aid to the Contras.

Now they face important issues for the second session, not the least child care, clean air and congressional ethics.

And if they want to look less like turkeys next year, they'll find ways to clean up their financial act.